Ryan Englin on Evolve: Reinventing Leadership - Building Freedom Cultures: Practical Tips for Recruitment and Retention

I went on Evolve: Reinventing Leadership with Yvette Bethel to talk about why recruitment is a marketing activity and how retention starts the moment someone applies, not the moment they show up for day one.

We opened with my origin story. I watched my dad grind himself into the ground running a business in the trades. I went to college, studied HR and training development, then spent over a decade in corporate. When I finally left and started my own company, I built a marketing firm to help people like my dad generate leads. A couple years in, every client told me the same thing. They didn't need more customers. They had empty trucks sitting in the yard and no people to put in them. So I took everything I learned about marketing funnels and applied it to recruiting. That pivot changed everything.

Yvette asked about recruiting funnels, and I walked through how we think about them. They don't need to be complex. They need to appeal to the right person. 70% of the workforce is passively looking. They aren't on Indeed. They're talking to friends, scrolling social media, reading the news. If you aren't showing up where they spend their time, you aren't in front of them at all. I shared the example of sponsoring a Little League team. Not for brand awareness with customers. For visibility with potential employees. If your best people have kids who play Little League, there are other parents in those stands who share the same values and work ethic. That's strategic sourcing done through the lens of recruiting as marketing.

We talked about how most company websites are built entirely for lead generation. Every radio ad, every homepage, every tagline is aimed at the customer. "We're available 24/7, our techs will stay until the job is done, the customer is always right." That sounds great to a homeowner. But to a technician reading that same message, it says: you will never have a peaceful evening. Your family will always come second. Flip the messaging. Talk about the kind of people you hire, how you invest in them, what the team looks like. The consumer still wants that company. And now the technician does too.

Yvette brought up resumes, and I gave my standard take. There are three types of resumes in this world. One written by a professional resume writer. One written by someone who has no idea what they're doing. And one written by AI. None of them tell you what you actually need to know. What we're looking for is a set of behaviors and traits that don't exist on a resume. I can teach someone to use my software. I can't teach them to be a great team player. That means every company needs to define those traits before they ever post a job. We do that through Core Fit Profiling, which starts by studying your best current employees and identifying what makes them someone you want to clone.

I broke down the difference between rock stars and superstars. Rock stars are the foundation of your team. Reliable, consistent, top 10% of what they do, and they don't want the next promotion. Superstars want the hockey-stick career trajectory. You need both, but the ratio matters. One superstar for every 10 to 20 rock stars. The mistake most companies make is promoting rock stars into roles they never wanted and watching them fail. That's the Peter Principle in action.

When Yvette asked what I do when a client calls with high turnover, I said my first question is always the same. Send me your exit interviews. The answer is almost always "we don't do exit interviews." Or worse: "We know why people leave." No. You don't. Then I ask for 12 months of turnover data so I can look for patterns. Is it a specific manager? A specific role? A specific time of year? The data tells a story. The gaps in that story tell you where to investigate.

On retention, I told Yvette what I tell everyone. People don't leave jobs. They leave people. Every time someone walks out the door, it traces back to a relationship that broke down or never existed. And retention starts at application. I've been married almost 20 years and I still remember my first date. So does my wife. That first interaction shapes everything that comes after. Did the candidate apply and get a call within 15 minutes? Or did their application sit in an inbox for two weeks? That moment influences whether they stay long term.

I closed with what I believe is the single most important factor in retention. People need to feel like they belong. They leave their family, their friends, and the things they do for fun every single day to come work for you. Money alone will never replace that. But when you create a sense of belonging, when people enjoy who they work with, when they feel like part of something bigger than themselves, recruiting gets easier and retention gets easier. People start telling their friends. And that's when the whole system starts working.

If you liked this conversation, I go deeper on building these systems on Titans of the Trades.